


Give Me Your Hand, If We Be Friends

by CopperBeech



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Don't copy to another site, First Kiss, Fluff and Humor, Hogback Wood - Freeform, Light Angst, Love Confessions, Lower Tadfield (Good Omens), Midsummer Night's Dream, Multi, Old Straight Track, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Shakespeare, ley lines, sweet but a little naughty - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-25 01:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20368453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of a well-intentioned Antichrist and a trio of friends bent on giving faltering Cupid a leg up.“There needs to be an escape hatch too,” said Pepper.“Escape?”“Well if there is a problem. If she wakes up and sees a badger or a fox and falls in love with it instead. It’s further on here, where the Fairy King cures the Queen after she falls in love with this Bottom.”All the boys sniggered. Bottoms were, alas, just too funny not to laugh at.





	Give Me Your Hand, If We Be Friends

**Author's Note:**

> As noted in my other fic in this fandom. I lack either a beta reader or a Britpicker, so any kind recommendations for repair will be welcome.
> 
> There's High Magic that's all about Light and Dark and then there's... the old magic. Post-Armageddnot seems like the time for it.

“I _fink,_” said Wensleydale, who often developed a bit of a lisp when he was deep in cogitation, “I _fink_ he loves her a lot. And she’s keen on him but has cold feet. She’s talking about going back to America now, and he’s got this long face. He’s just got no idea how to – to take it to the next level.” The language of video games seemed the aptest.

“Well, he does call around a lot, even if he has to drive up here in that Wabbasi thing that breaks down all the time,” agreed Brian, who mostly agreed with things.

They were, of course, discussing Anathema Device, who had now extended her lease of Jasmine Cottage to, as she put it, “map the lines of force” that according to her had been redrawn around Tadfield. The Them were not quite sure what that involved, but it seemed to call for a great deal of stalking around in long flowing skirts with her hair down and a pendulum in one hand, a sight that captivated Wensleydale, who truth be known had a bit of a crush on Anathema. However, he was sensible enough to know when someone was above his pay grade, given that that pay grade was currently two pound a week pocket money for things like ice creams. If she was beyond his aspiration, he wanted the cleverest person he knew of to have her, and so far as he could tell that person was Newt Pulsifer –who, unfortunately, if you were to go by early departures in Dick Turpin and occasional bursts of impatience from Anathema when the Them were visiting, was somewhere in the neighborhood of the dog house. As the dog house was only big enough for Dog, who was currently lounging on the grass behind Adam’s head, this was a problem.

“We should do something,” he said. “Give them a nudge, like.” His class had done a slightly potted panto version of _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ the previous year, and he was imagining some sort of magical intervention to show them the truth of their pitiably confused grown-up hearts. At eleven, you know what you want and it fills you with immediate and unmistakable yearning; adults seemed to have a terrible time knowing what would make them happy. “Adam could do something.”

“Relationships are the business of the people having them,” said Pepper. “Telling people who they should choose for a partner is a patriarchal imposition.”

“I could,” said Adam, who was lying back looking at the clouds, which were admittedly huge and fat and white and magnificent, deciding what different sorts of supernatural monsters they looked like. “Only Specs and Shades” – this was what the Them called Aziraphale and Crowley in their private language, to avoid undue adult curiosity – “both told me that my powers should only ever be used to make things right. Is getting them together making things right?”

“It’s _interfering,_” said Pepper.

“It’s _helping_,” said Wensleydale, “and helping’s making things right, isn’t it?”

They quarreled about it amicably for a while, Adam mainly only feigning reluctance because, truth be told, he fancied the idea of letting out his celestial powers for a walk that didn’t involve having to restructure huge tracts of Earthly Creation in one blazing go. That had left him feeling a bit light-headed for days. Wensley put forth the notion that if Newt married Anathema, she might never go back to America, and since she had the cottage already, they would settle down in Tadfield and be the most excellent unofficial godparents four tweenagers with a supernatural secret could dream of, plus he would always be able to gaze surreptitiously at her. He could come round and offer to dig out their flower beds. Or paint the shutters.

Pepper was still holding out, but when Wensley made this point she thought about the possibilities of having a real witch as a local mentor, and considered that her feminism might profit from that connection back to the wise crones of history, and couldn’t find it in her heart to argue. Brian, of course, agreed again because, well, he agreed.

“What do you think, Dog?” asked Adam. “Should I do it?”

Dog rolled over and exhibited his belly, which didn’t seem much of an answer, but Wensley pointed out that dogs do this when they’re happy and feel safe, so clearly it was a good, safe idea.

“I’ve got a book,” he said. “You should always be careful to research the details. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

* * *

They had made a small bonfire on the hill, and burned every last one of Agnes Nutter’s prophecies in it. What they didn’t know, because Anathema wasn’t paying close attention and Newt had no clue, was that the fire had a sizable bundle of wendwood in it. Tradition on what counts as wendwood varies, but pine and rowan together definitely count, and Newt had laid in a handful of each. At a more critical phase of the moon, or day of the year, this kind of carelessness could have unleashed anything from a stampede of antlered riders to a rain of toads; in whatever titrations, wendwood smoke blurs the boundaries between the worlds, and the prognosis is rarely more wholesome than with any other sort of fistula. It being daylight, and half way between quarters of the moon, and a not particularly crucial time of year, the only thing it evoked this time was a small, barely-ajar, portal to the realm of Faerie, not large enough for queens, kings or psychopomps but just wide enough to admit the passage of an androgynous, feckless Spirit of Jamming Things Up.

Oh, and to bugger up the ley lines in the immediate vicinity. Anathema noticed it, well, _almost_ right away. But she hadn’t been paying attention to the fire, and didn’t make the connection.

She just started to get really annoyed with Newt.

* * *

The Them got together the next day at Adam’s place, since he really was the leader, even though the current plan seemed to depend a lot on Wensleydale’s ideas. He came armed with a colorful, slender binder containing the script from last year’s panto, and a grown-up book his father had handed him when he saw Wensley reading the script over again. “You should try the original,” his Da had said. “You’re clever enough.”

He passed the binder around to his friends, pointing out the relevant passages.

“You see, it works,” he said. “There’s only problems if you get the wrong person. If we just do it _right_ it’ll work a treat. If we can find out which flower is Love In Idleness.”

Adam had his computer on. It was an older model but certainly capable of a Google search. “Pansies,” he said shortly.

“That makes it simple,” said Wensley. “My Mum’s got loads of them all around the front garden.”

“How do we get them when they’re asleep?” mulled Brian. “We can’t exactly break in, and besides, he’s not been staying over.”

“She’s got something on next Saturday night,” said Pepper. “I heard them talking about her going out the night of the full moon, to do something witchy. She wanted to go alone and Newt wanted to go to make sure she was safe. They’ll be up at the orchard together, so far as I can tell.”

“See, he really cares about her,” said Wensley sagely.

“How do we make sure they go to sleep up there?”

“That’s where Adam comes into it.” said Wensley. “Sleep is good for you, so making them fall asleep is, well, helping.”

“Can’t Adam just make it happen, like Cupid on all the Valentines?”

“I’m not going along with an idea like that,” said Pepper. “It’s coercive. This is sporting. It’s gentle magic that works with the energies. If she’s meant to be with him, it will be.” She had been spending a good deal of time with Anathema’s library.

Adam rather liked the idea of not being the only one responsible for everything. The fact was, he could recreate and restore and resurrect and make people forget, but the longer he considered the matter, complicated emotions like adult romances seemed a little frightening to contemplate, like trying to play video games and eat lunch at the same time you were riding through the motorway crossing on your bicycle.

“There needs to be an escape hatch too,” said Pepper.

“Escape?”  
  
“Well if there is a problem. If she wakes up and sees a badger or a fox and falls in love with it instead. It’s further on here, where the Fairy King cures the Queen after she falls in love with this Bottom.”

All the boys sniggered. Bottoms were, alas, just too funny not to laugh at.

Pepper called on all her dignity. “It says Diana’s Bloom, and Diana was the moon goddess, so we have to find that flower too,” she said.

They all got up as one and rode their bicycles over to Wensley’s.

Wensley’s offer to his Mum to have his friends weed her flower bed was a surprise but struck a receptive note. “We just like being outside while it’s so nice,” he said, “and Pepper said it looked weedy. We’ll fix it up for you.”

They did extract a fair number of weeds, and also a large fistful of pansy blooms, which were prolific enough that a few weren’t missed.

Squeezing them for juice, however, was the kind of pastime that makes older people say “bugger this for a lark.” Being underage for this kind of language, Brian was the first to say, simply, “This isn’t working.”

You could squeeze a pansy till it screamed, it seemed, and juice was just not going to come out of it. It was Pepper who had the next idea. “Anathema has been teaching me to make flower essences,” she said with the quiet pride of someone who’s been chosen by a witch to learn witchy things. “I s’pose it’s a bit unfair to turn it around on her, but… that might work.”

“If you put them on people’s eyes is it safe?” wondered Brian.

“They’re basically water that’s been used to wash a crystal and then you put it in the sun with some flower petals, so yes,” said Pepper. “I can use all these.”

“What about the moon flower? It would be awful if she wanted to marry a badger. Or a hedgehog.”

“Old Mr. Tyler’s got something called moon vine that he planted on the trellis around his bins,” suggested Wensley.

“I can get some,” said Adam, fetched by the thought of jumping over old Tyler’s fence and raiding his trellis.

Only Pepper, who had been least on board with the idea from the beginning, noticed that this was becoming an absurdly complicated scheme for its purpose. It was, in fact, a regular Rube Goldberg device of a plan, but then, exactly that sort of thing appeals when you’re eleven. And truth be told – for her as well as for the others – saving the world had been a heady, exhilarating experience, one that made the prospect of going back to school at the end of the summer and doing normal things go a little pale. Casting a love charm struck just the right balance between scary and mundane. Probably nothing dramatic would really happen; they were going to use homeopathic flower essences, after all. And there was something intoxicating about the idea of slipping out of the house and seeing their favorite paths through the Tadfield woods in the moonlight. She got on her bike, taking with her the grown-up playbook that Wensley had lent her, and pedaled off.

When Adam showed up at Pepper’s house with an armful of flowers the next day, there was a little of a parental buzz about romantic precociousness. It perplexed everyone when Pepper grabbed the flowers from him, thanked him, shut the door and bounded upstairs.

They all marked off another day on their calendars.

* * *

“I love her but I can’t seem to get it across to her,” said Newt. Anathema had shooed him out of Jasmine Cottage long before he meant to conclude his visit, pleading a particularly taxing “working” that had to be attended to, and which he suspected was invented for the occasion. He had encountered the Them while trying to restart Dick Turpin in the village square and ended by buying everyone an ice and going back to Pepper’s place, which was nearest, to eat the ices in the garden. He was actually sitting directly beneath Pepper’s bedroom window, which faced West and had a perfect sunny exposure for the jam jars filled with crystal-dredged distilled water (she had stolen it from the jug in her mother’s laundry room), on which floated a rainbow of soggy pansy petals and moon vine blooms.

Pepper’s Mum had taken at face value her daughter’s explanation that the American woman knew a lot about natural cosmetics and was teaching her to make a skin wash. Pepper’s tomboyishness had caused her mother a bit of anxiety, and she was glad to see her daughter taking an interest in feminine things. The American lady was eccentric, but she was very graceful with her long skirts.

“Have you tried asking her to marry you?” asked Brian, who was habitually direct and to the point, even when he didn’t always know what the point was.

“You can’t just ask someone to marry you when they’re cross with you.”

“Maybe she’s cross with you because you haven’t asked,” said Wensley, ever the thinker.

“Marriage is a construct of the patriarchy anyway,” said Pepper. “It can be the enemy of love.”

“I’m just going to have to learn to move on,” said Newt. “Only I told her I’d come back next week. She’s got something on and I want to help. She just won’t explain. But I think I have to realize it’s over. Lots of other fish in the sea. Even Agnes Nutter said we only had the once, and… why am I telling this to you kids?”

“Because grownups never listen?” said Adam.

Newt went back down the lane towards Dick Turpin with his shoulders slumped, the picture of discouragement.

“Now we’re just going to have to do them both,” said Wensley.

* * *

Anathema sat over a table in Jasmine Cottage, staring at a litter of books, Tarot cards, and oddly shaped objects arranged in a circle beneath the pendulum dangling from her right forefinger, seeing none of it. She didn’t know why she kept snapping at Newt. Every time he came up for a visit, she promised herself she wouldn’t let her impatience get the better of her. Something was gnawing her, nonetheless. This was supposed to be the rest of their lives – her own life, with no more running on the autopilot of her wonderful but quite-enough-thank-you ancestress. But then, that notion seemed to bring with it a little devil whispering in her ear that a new life didn’t necessarily mean falling forever into the arms of the person Agnes had sent her.

She wanted to. And then he would do or say some puppydog thing that should have seemed sweet but unaccountably made her want to smack him. When she talked about going back to the States, she more than half hoped he would throw his arms around her knees and beg her not to. Instead he just gazed up at her from behind his spectacles, looking a lot like a basset hound with moderately disabling depression.

She set down the pendulum and picked up one of the books. Thumbed through It, put it down. Leafed through another. A thought came to her.

She pushed away from the plethora of magical objects, unearthed the phone, and dialed a bookshop in London.

* * *

As the sun set, a faint will o’ the wisp drifted over the jam jar in Pepper’s window. It might have been just a trick of the sinking light.

* * *

The Bentley rolled into Tadfield at about a quarter after four the following Saturday, containing a demon who had just enjoyed an exhilarating drive and an angel who seemed to be surreptitiously counting his extremities to make sure they were all still there.

“Thank you for driving me,” said Aziraphale, despite looking as if he had just come off an especially terrifying ride at some American fairground, possibly involving a water slide. “Anathema will be very glad we could come.”

“So what was she on about?”

“She wanted me to bring certain books. Something to do with the aftershocks, she phrased it.”

“Oh well, be a lark, see the kids. See You. You’ve been scarce since we closed the Ritz that night, I canceled reservations twice last week.”

“The bookshop’s impossible,” demurred Aziraphale. “Adam put everything back but with extras, and it’s taking ages to make sense of it. I keep finding things like _Astonishing X-Men_ beside the grimoires and the first editions of Carlyle.”

In fact Aziraphale was not being entirely honest, shocking as it is to say that about a creature of Heaven. Since they had managed to keep the world from being destroyed – a series of events that had led, among other things, to Crowley sleeping for the better part of a week – he had been thrown back on his bibliophile solitude to consider what this meant to the long-standing Arrangement. Bluntly, it seemed there wasn’t much need for it any more. Neither of their Head Offices would be calling on them for services in the future, and the prospect of having nothing to scheme about with the demon left the angel feeling indescribably empty. They had had a few drunken post-mortems of the events of Armageddnot – “I felt dreadful for you about the car, dear” – “You should have seen your face when Adam popped you right out of Madame Tracy!” – but how long would that last? What would their friendship be now? He had been able to push some thoughts to the side for centuries. Those centuries were over.

They pulled up outside Jasmine Cottage, which was chaotic and lovely in the late summer light. Anathema popped out the door – she must have been watching for them – offered them echinacea tea, and reached eagerly into the small valise Aziraphale set on the table. There were several books with the patina of centuries, and one that looked more recent – the publication date on the overleaf was in the 1920’s.

“Yes, that’s the one,” she said. “It contained some material from around Tadfield that wasn’t in any of the other editions. You’re an angel, Mr. Fell.”

“Well – naturally.”

She smiled radiantly. “Watkins mapped all the ley lines between the beacons and landmarks of Old Britain,” she went on, turning to the index, “and so far as I can tell he made hardly any errors, but this region was sketchy, and ever since… well, ever since _then_ the tracks I did map while I was investigating seem… disturbed somehow. Cut across, or out of… well, out of line. I’m a bit on my own with this now, probably I shouldn’t have burnt the – “

There was a knock at the door. She flung it open to expose Newt standing on the doorstep, already wearing the apprehensive flinch of a child who’s pretty sure he’s been caught at something.

“I wasn’t expecting you until later,” she said gruffly. “All right, come in.”

He mooched across the doorsill and looked around for a chair, regarding Crowley apprehensively. He had never quite gotten comfortable with the idea of an authentically Gothic demon. After all, he had been originally conscripted as a witch-finder, and the powers of Hell or anything adjacent still wound him up.

“ – as I was _saying_ before we were interrupted,” Anathema went on, “I probably _shouldn’t_ have burnt the prophecies. Nothing I can do about it now, though. But just to be sure nothing happened that needs to be, well, repaired, I wanted to compare Watkins with my maps. There’s a full moon tonight and it’s the best shot I have at tracing all the lines of force. _Traditionally,_ the lines will manifest when a virgin treads on them at zenith plenilune, but since I’m _not_ one” – here Newt could be observed blushing to the roots of his hair – “I’ve needed to research some alternative methods. These other books will help.” She squared them, in a stack on her worktable. “I’ll just need a few hours with them…”

“We can come back later in the evening,” said Aziraphale. “We’re going for tea at the Youngs’. I had quite a few things turn up in my shop that I thought Adam… would like, and I’ve brought them along as well.”

They could hear Anathema addressing Newt, and Newt responding in what could only be called a polite whine, as they returned to the Bentley between the overgrown garden plots.

“You do have to look a bit for that edition of Watkins,” said Aziraphale, “but do you suppose she’s just hanging around Tadfield because of that young man? He does seem quite keen.”

“Angel, you know you wouldn’t recognize _keen_ if you fell over it. ‘Least… oh that’s not good.” Anathema’s voice had just risen in a loud American swear.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” quoted Aziraphale.

“Oh, don’t you start with _him._”

“Let’s go to tea,” said Aziraphale diplomatically.

* * *

The Youngs had set out a pleasant collation, and were visibly restraining themselves from candidly cross-examining the angel and the demon about _how_ exactly they had known something was happening in Tadfield, and _what _exactly had happened when they had disappeared with Adam, and whether they thought everything was going to be all right now, but they managed to work the questions in around the edges of the conversation anyway. Adam was courteous, thanking Aziraphale for the books, which were indeed exactly ones he wanted but felt it would be wrong to manifest for himself. Giving them to a bookseller amounted to helping, he thought, and receiving them back gratis was a benefit he hadn’t expected. He had been thinking more of suggesting his parents take him by Mr. Fell’s shop next time they went down to London.

“Conjunctivitis, is it?” asked Mrs. Young, gesturing at Crowley’s sunglasses. “The allergies can be so dreadful this time of year. I always have to take Piriteze, though I’ve held off today so we could have a bit of sherry with dessert – it makes you _so_ drowsy.”

“A condition,” Crowley deflected. “Chronic.”

The sherry was nice – a Lustau Pedro Jimenez served with a pear tart – and after eating only a few bites of tart Adam asked to be excused, thanked Mr. Fell again and ran outside. “You can’t keep the boy indoors,” said Mr, Young. “Wholesome, really. I suppose he’s gotten into all the mischief one boy can handle in a summer, don’t you think?”

* * *

Adam reconnoitered with the Them about fifteen minutes later, when everyone had escaped from their families’ various suppers and shown up at the bandstand. The news that Uncle Shades and Uncle Specs had turned up was met with mixed excitement and apprehension. “You don’t suppose they’re going to be going along?” worried Brian.

“We’re just going to have to improvise if they do,” said Wensley. It was one of his vocabulary words of the week, and he relished the opportunity to use it.

Pepper withdrew from the inside pocket of her anorak two brown glass bottles whose battered labels, washed almost to illegibility, divulged that they had once contained vanilla extract and rum flavoring, respectively. “Here’s the pansy,” she said, handing one to Brian and one to Wensleydale. “I’ve got the moonflower here, for emergencies. We’ll go home and pretend to go to our rooms, and meet up down the road from the cottage as soon as we can. Once it’s dark we can hide in the shrubbery.”

The bottles changed hands amid a sudden airless thump of four hearts. Power was about to walk the night, or at least crisscross it on Bullet bicycles.

* * *

Adam made it back to the house, with a fair amount of clatter, just as the celestial guests were taking their leave, pleading the longish drive back to London. Twilight was gathering outside the windows. “Say goodnight to Mr. Fell and Mr. Crowley, Adam,” coached his mother. “Then go up to bed. It’s past time already, what am I going to do with you?”

Adam shook hands all round and thumped upstairs obediently. No one noticed when he slipped down in his sock feet moments later, carrying his trainers, and moved like a ghost out the kitchen door.

“About an hour down the M1, and we’ve got to stop off at Jasmine Cottage,” Aziraphale said. “Anathema will have my books.”

“How long have you known Miss Device anyway?” asked Mrs, Young, who had made a stab at the washing-up and was wearing a Chef Emeril apron. The Youngs were still having difficulty piecing out how their son had fallen in with so many slightly supernatural, or at least violently eccentric, individuals who nonetheless appeared to have his best interests at heart. Crowley and Aziraphale could both be charming in their ways, though, and had rather won her over.

“Not long,” Crowley answered, “we just ran into her, sort of…”

“And discovered a mutual interest in old books,” finished Aziraphale.

“They’re a sweet couple,” Mrs. Young said as they drove off in the Bentley.

“Couple? Do you think?” Mr. Young had still not quite sorted out all the business of wedding cakes with two grooms, and so on, though he tried to move with the times.

“Oh, you can tell, they’re close as twelve o’ clock, even if they’re so – well – different. Come help me dry the dishes.”

The Piriteze, which she had popped as soon as the sherry had had a chance to wear off a little, kicked in quickly enough that she lay back on the coverlet without checking on Adam and was soon lost to the world. Mr. Young smiled indulgently at the sight of her peaceful repose, tugged off her shoes, and lay down with one arm protectively over her.

* * *

The Them had ditched their bikes behind a hedge and were hunkered down next to them in good time to spot the Bentley pulling sleekly up. They saw the line of light as Anathema let them in, faint voices, and not long after there was a brief commotion of everyone leaving the cottage at once.

“Drop you in the Bentley?” they could hear Uncle Shades offering. “It’s on our way.” Anathema seemed to be agreeable.

In fact, she was hoping to avoid any more strolling in the moonlight with the relentless Newt than she could manage. Maybe another time… oh, she didn’t know what she felt about this… but this was not the moment. Ironically, the whole ley-tracing matter had been a little bit of an excuse to linger in Tadfield – she knew that earth magic was tough magic and usually mended itself – but the longer she stayed, and the more Newt became unaccountably irritating, the more she felt determined to pursue the matter until she could say she’d finished her job here.

It was who she was. Without connecting to the old forces of the Earth, the occupation of witches, she felt adrift.

“Right here,” she said after a few minutes, pointing out a spot where rows of apple orchards marched below the road, sharing a ragged border with a tongue of the Hogback Wood. “This is where I dowsed the lines almost as soon as I got here, and now the track just – breaks off. If I can find what’s wrong, this is the night for it. Newt’s got a torch, and I’ve got my pendulum and dowsing wand. Thanks for taking us this far. Don’t wait up.”

“What can I do?” said Newt.

“Carry this,” answered Anathema curtly, tossing an irregular rucksack from the Bentley’s boot. Since it was full of Newt’s own leftover witch-finder gear, which he had thought might come in handy, the admonition seemed superfluous.

She stepped off into the borders of the orchard, holding a forked hazel wand ahead of her, and began to pace slowly, headed toward a little clear space that intervened before the undergrowth of the Hogback crept up to the bounds of the orchard. Newt followed, lugging.

Instead of pulling away, though, Crowley cut the engine.. He left the CD player going – it was rendering “Need Your Loving Tonight” by Edvard Grieg – and stepped out onto the shoulder as the pair picked their way along a hedge that bounded the southern end of the orchard, jogging a bit where the Wood thrust into it. The full moon was just clearing the treetops, laying sharp shadows of the apple branches down on the grass as it sloped away from the shoulder of the road, tissues of cloud floating past in a faint prismatic haze. Tadfield truly was an anomaly, the one place in England where every season’s beauties arrived exactly on time and at the apex of perfection.

“Take a moment, angel. London’ll be there when we get back. Remember when there was barely a road up these parts?”

This was un-Crowley-like, but he had a point, and Aziraphale left his valise of books in the passenger footwell, joining him on the orchard side of the car.

It did seem a shame to go back to London just yet, with all its light pollution and constant hum; at least Aziraphale thought so. The full moon tangled in the treetops, going in and out of cloud-drift, reminding him of this island before all the electricity and noise. For a while they leaned back against the Bentley in companionate silence, even when the CD deck changed to “My Fairy King” by Maurice Ravel.

“Do you think we _should _keep an eye out for them?” he said, liking the excuse to linger, just the two of them and the soothing noises of the Bentley’s engine popping and cooling.

“_Ohhh_, you know, two young people full of hormones on a lovely moonlit night in the forest, what could go wrong?” Crowley answered, tilting his head thoughtfully. “Couple out on a night like this, just leave them to each other. Made my job easier in the past, I can tell you…“

“What’s that?”

“What’s what, Angel?”

“I thought I saw someone else running along the edge of the orchard.”

“Moonlight. Makes you fanciful. All those poets of yours say so, don’t they?”

“It doesn’t ever make you fanciful, Crowley?”

“Now, what would I fancy?”

Aziraphale was considering his answer, but now he was sure he saw another movement between them and the trees, and the choked-off sound of a high-pitched, imperfectly muffled child’s voice reached his ears.

“Is that young Wensley?” he said holding out a hand for silence. Crowley snapped his fingers and shut off the CD deck. For a moment there was nothing to be seen or heard, then a shadow and a flash of white in the moonlight was swallowed up by the tongue of forest that had shortly before absorbed Newt and Anathema. Several seconds ticked past, and then a high joyful voice in the distance called out “Can’t catch me! Whoo, whoo!”

Angel eyes met demon Ray-Bans. Clearly intervention was required. They were so alarmed by the calls coming from the trees ahead that they passed right by Adam, who was sitting, very still, half inside the orchard’s boundary hedge. But then, he was so deep in a meditative trance by that time that he missed their passage just as obliviously.

A flicker of light, possibly no more than yellowed leaves wafting in and out of a moonbeam, travelled for a moment over the branches of the Wood close to where the young people had entered. As Crowley, longer-legged and quicker than his angel companion, followed their trail, shouting “Oi! You kids!!” it disappeared, swallowed up in the leafy silence.

* * *

Adam had listened until the halloos of his companions began to separate inside the Wood, then concentrated. He did this by sitting crosslegged, like in some of the _New Aquarian_ articles, and imagining rainbow colored circles going up his spine. It helped him focus. “Oh Many Paddy Hum,” he intoned quietly, just to help things along.

He started out with a plan, which was to send a blanket of sleep down over the Hogback Wood that would snare anyone over the age of fifteen. He didn’t want to make his friends even yawn, so erring on the side of caution seemed best.

The play had made it quite clear that leading astray and confusion was a precondition, hence the hallooing. As soon as Brian or Wensley came upon Newt and Anathema – who would, presumably, have swooned into sleep in close proximity – the magic could be applied, they would regroup, and wait to see the lovers emerge, presumably billing if not cooing. As plans went, it seemed flawless. They’d prevented Armageddon, after all. This was something like a cool-down..

* * *

“Here,” said Anathema when she’d gone over the ground twice. “The rod swivels down till it’s nearly pulling from my hand right up – to – here, and then – nothing. It just goes dead, right here where you come back out into the orchard.” She thrust the forked wand into her belt, extracted the pendulum and began to trace the same line, when a weird, avian sound off to the left reached them..

“What – “ said Newt.

A Red Indian whoop right out of _Peter Pan_, far off to their right, interrupted him. He waved the torch through the trees, but there was nothing. “Ow, get that out of my eyes,” snapped Anathema.

“Those kids are following us,” he said. “Aren’t they supposed to be in bed?”

“Isn’t that their parents’ problem?”

Within minutes, distracted by calls and taunts, each was completely out of patience with the other, and Newt had set off in the direction of the last call while Anathema tried her luck with a summoning charm that was almost complete when she began to feel warm, dozy, as if she’d just had one of those far too stodgy English dinners. Suddenly the idea of stretching out in the grass seemed deliciously inviting. No wonder the children loved this wood. If she were close to the earth she might feel the fluxes in its force. It all seemed sensible.

She was asleep before her head could settle itself on the abandoned rucksack.

* * *

Even celestial beings and hereditary witches are no match for eleven-year-olds who know the woods like the back of their hands. Newt, of course, was even more hopelessly outclassed. Within twenty paces he was totally disoriented, and when he turned off the torch, trying to tell if a flicker ahead in the trees was something caught in its beam or a separate light that might be one of the children, he promptly put his foot in the opening of a badger’s sett. The resulting pratfall knocked the wind out of him and the torch out of his hand. Scrambling over the bracken to retrieve it, he found himself overcome by the attraction of putting his head on his arm. Just for a moment, to recover from that jolt. “Anathema,” he sighed and then went limp.

* * *

The angel and the demon exceeded Adam’s upper age limit by a factor of about sixty centuries. After that, their susceptibility varied.

Aziraphale had entered the forest a good way behind Crowley, stepping carefully because these were good shoes, and now he thought he saw – at an extraordinary distance – a flicker of light that – was the demon summoning _Hellfire_ to light his way?

“What are you playing at, Crowley, you’ll start a fire,” he muttered and moved off in its direction. Or what he thought was its direction. Now it was gone. No – there it was over there; Crowley must be moving rather quickly. “My dear?” he called out. “Is there any sign of them?”

There was no answer, just an odd wave of drowsiness. It left almost as quickly as it came. Sleep had never much appealed to Aziraphale anyway – like the Asian monks who supposedly first discovered the properties of tea, he felt any time spent unconscious when you could be devouring another book was time wasted. Additionally, Adam’s magic still had an Infernal cast, to which he was slightly immune from centuries of resisting the powers of Hell, with his recent adventure Below (even in Crowley’s form) as a sort of booster shot.. And not least, though the idea of lying down on the carpet of leaves appealed briefly, the idea of what it would do to a pristine dove-coloured morning coat didn’t bear thinking about. He shook off the last of the vague lassitude and kept going.

Crowley, on the other hand, still had a fading resonance to the vibrations of Below, and besides could sleep for decades, so it only took a nudge of Adam’s powers to overcome him with drowsiness as he paused in a small dell trying to get his bearings.

“‘ ’ll just sit down here for a moment and regroup,” he said, before his whole length keeled over to the well-littered, cushy forest floor, narrowly missing a large patch of gorse.

* * *

Pepper returned first, with disturbing news.

“I think Uncle Specs followed us in,” she said. “I’m sure I saw him. Didn’t they leave?”

“He can be _inside_ other people,” pondered Adam. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“What if he tells – “

A rustle heralded the return of Wensley. “I didn't see Brian, is he back yet?"

Before anyone could answer, an indistinct shout came from deep in the wood.

* * *

Brian picked out two pale flashes close together in the moonlight and the hair on his arms prickled up. He had just stumbled over Newt's torch, and it was now in his jacket pocket. Very, very carefully and silently, he crept on his belly towards a form ahead in the murk – the outline of a head and shoulders, the moon now clearly casting a twinned reflection from eyeglasses, then going back behind a drift of cloud, rendering the blackness under the trees almost absolute. Brian inched forward as if under barbed wire, for no particular reason except that it seemed the thing to do. Creeping up behind Newt’s head, he eased the glasses an inch down onto his nose and let a few drops from the vanilla-extract bottle fall on each lid.

Just then, the moon emerged from the cloud, and he realized it wasn’t Newt. “Ngk,” moaned Crowley, and shifted in the soft layer of leaves. He was just getting started.

You could ask how anyone, even in the dark, could mistake the demon for a haplessly inept computer engineer who went everywhere in a duffel coat even in high summer, but then Brian, though a sweet kid, wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and never had been. Besides, he had seen Uncle Specs and Uncle Shades, sending the younger pair off from that absolutely rad car of theirs. Realizing that it was Crowley supine on the forest floor temporarily blanked out his mind as if its hard drive had been wiped. The vial fell from his hand, glugging the rest of its contents harmlessly into the leaf mould.

“Gnnngh,” said Crowley, rolling over and subsiding deeper into slumber.

Brian ran as if all the hosts of Hell were after him.

* * *

Newt’s sleep was light and quickly broken by contrast, because he suddenly, desperately needed a wee. It had taken a large Thermos of coffee to keep him alert during the drive and through the evening – he had been on a swing shift at the computer installation, where the management reckoned he could do the least damage – and he was annoyed that it not only hadn’t worked but was clamoring for release. He looked around him, saw no sign of Anathema, felt nonetheless exposed in an open space suffused with bluish moonlight, and made his way down to a denser patch where almost no light penetrated. Unzipping, he leaned his forehead against a tree in a suppliant stance of blessed relief. It took a measurable amount of time and made more noise than he would have imagined out here in the arboreal silence. He was just turning away to zip up when the commotion of a large body disturbing the undergrowth a few yards away froze him. “Nggg… ‘s’it raining?”

Newt stood, paralyzed, with his hand on his fly as the shadowy form of Crowley unfurled from the forest floor and grew more distinct to his dark-adapted eye.

“Oh, you adorn the night,” breathed Crowley in a tone of outright worship. “Stay like that. Let my eyes feast.”

As if in emphasis, he drew the sunglasses from their semipermanent perch on his nose, bending his amber, reptilian, faintly glowing gaze on the terrified Newt, who began to back away, unconsciously whimpering. His lungs refused to take in air, his heart constricted and his life passed before his eyes as Crowley closed the distance between them, pressing a fork-tongued kiss against his alarmed lips (and bitten tongue, and eye teeth). With a heroic effort, bracing against a tree, he pushed Crowley off and staggered up out of the dell.

“No – my darling! my everything! stay!” called Crowley in a tone of helpless pleading, springing up on gangly mile-eating legs. Newt finally, frankly, uttered a long, wordless, gargling shout of terror and pelted off back toward the orchard row where he’d left Anathema, propelled by a frantic flood of adrenaline, a still sleep-addled Crowley in ardent pursuit.

* * *  
Brian scrambled back into the clearing where Adam remained crosslegged, and Pepper and Wensley had only moments before regrouped, close to tears with distress. “I’ve buggered it up,” he all but sobbed.

“Brian. What.” Adam was weirdly calm; it must be the Yoga position.

“I thought it was Newt and I got Uncle Shades. I thought they left.”

There was silence in the clearing as the Them contemplated the mind-bending possibilities. At first, nothing broke it but a few sounds of night creatures in the brush. Then, some distance away, they heard shouting.

“Oh, we’re so grounded,” said Wensley.

* * *

Newt’s heart lifted as he saw the trees thin out, and spotted a Bramley with accommodating branches. Trying to remember whether he had ever climbed a tree even in childhood, he launched himself into its lower fork and began to struggle upward. Short twigs poked him, his glasses went askew, one foot caught, an apple thudded to the ground with a report that to his frantic senses resonated like a cannonball. He clung halfway up the tree, half concealed in the leaves, thudding in every extremity with stark terror.

* * *

Crowley managed to pick up the trail pretty quickly, given his snakelike sense for scent and lingering body heat, but was thrown off at the point where Newt’s feet had left the ground, and paused for a moment, vexed with longing and the final cobwebs of sleep and a distant struggle to remember why the Heaven he was even out here. Crashing forward in the direction he’d last seen Newt running (Newt, above him in the tree, nearly fainted with relief and had to bite his coatsleeve to mute his sobs of gratitude), Crowley plunged between the trunks of Bramleys, Royal Galas and Coxes calling plaintively “Come to me! I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world! A holiday in Mallorca! A weekend at the Ritz!” He was still, fuzzy-minded, trying to think of suitable temptations when he struck a solid, yet soft obstacle elongated on the grass of the orchard, and found himself lying across the sprawled form of Anathema, with his foot hooked in the heel of her boot.

Her eyes shot open. For a moment her incredulous expression could have meant anything; then her hands flew up to fist in his coppery hair and she pulled him down, making an animal sound in the back of her throat that was halfway between the warning growl of a cornered moggie and the sound a famished field worker might make at the first scent of a solid meal. Crowley windmilled both arms frantically for a moment before finding a purchase and propelling himself up off the deadfall-littered ground, spitting and swearing.

“Mine!” shrieked Anathema, getting straight to the point.

“Gerroff!!!” managed Crowley, equally directly.

Anathema was not interested in demurrals. Crowley scrambled backwards, she flailed to her feet, there was another brief, vertical wrestling match as she tugged at his jacket and he pushed at the front of her coat. “Show me your saffron orbs, I glimpsed them once,” breathed Anathema. Finally breaking free, Crowley found himself calling on a vague memory, and huffed

_“Your hands than mine are quicker for a fray,  
My legs are longer though, to run away.”_

Which he was doing as he spoke. Anathema howled in thwarted longing and flung herself after him.

* * *

Newt, still treed, would have revealed himself for few things, but the wailing voice of his beloved made every hair stand on end. “Anathema! Where are you?” he shouted, scrambling down from the eye-poking branches. He had just barely made it to the bottom of the tree when Crowley collided with him, pressing him back into the rough trunk and throatily wheezing “You, my idol, my all in all.” Newt wondered if he had possibly escaped the grip of gravity, because he felt his feet leaving the ground, but it was only Crowley lifting him against the tree and breathing hotly down his neck. The sudden release that came almost immediately lost its sense of reprieve when he saw Anathema pulling frantically at a rebuffing Crowley, crying “My light, my lodestone, my North Star!” The better part of valor seemed to lie in scrambling up the tree again.

* * *

By this time, of course, even a deaf pensioner could have figured out where they were and it wasn’t much trouble at all for Aziraphale, though he was picking his way to keep from spoiling the shoes. When he saw the three forms silhouetted against the moonlight, Anathema was tugging at the hem of Crowley’s jacket, while Crowley was braced in the lower limbs of the apple tree and struggling upwards towards Newt, gasping “Don’t think I don’t know my way around _these_ things!” Newt, spotting Aziraphale, thudded clumsily down on the far side of the tree, skidding against the turf, only to have Anathema go for him with her fingernails, wailing “Keep away from him, you – you – “

“Anathema! Oh _dear_!!!” Aziraphale tried to get her attention, producing only a startled pause as she struggled to grasp the appearance of a fourth person on the scene. Entirely in her own world by now, she shrugged off the interference and threw herself back on Crowley, who pushed her away, swearing in terms that made Aziraphale blanch even as he got his hands under Crowley’s arms and hauled back on him, hard. Crowley turned to face him, and his was the stance of a lost man, disoriented, blank.

  
“Aziraphale…? Aziraphale, let go. I have to have him. I can’t live without him.”

With more presence of mind than he would ever have imagined he could muster, Aziraphale said “Really? You didn’t even talk like that when your Bentley burned up.”

“Oh bugger the Bentley.”

Now Aziraphale knew they were in seriously deep water. He did the only thing he could think of to do, which was to throw himself bodily against Crowley, incidentally knocking a regrouped Anathema sideways, and miracle them both back, with every ounce of angelic force he could muster, into the clearing where they had both entered the tree canopy an hour before.

* * *

Anathema hit the floor of the orchard with a thump, scrambled up, saw only that her newly minted true love had vanished and collapsed face-down in racking sobs. Newt made the cardinal mistake of leaning over her, murmuring “Anathema – sweetheart –– it’s all right. We’ll fix it. Something’s happened but we’ll fix it.” He was rewarded by her elbow-punching backwards into his solar plexus, producing a sound somewhere between a whoopee cushion and a an irate Skye Terrier. The world faded out for a moment. When his lungs started working again, she was nowhere to be seen.

He lay for several long minutes looking up at the moon, wondering how Sergeant Shadwell would cope with this. Presently he sat up and began rummaging in his duffel pockets.

* * *.

“I din’t think they were here,” said Brian miserably. “What do we do now?”

“Well – Wensley, you’ve got to find Newt.”

“Why me?” complained Wensley.

“ ‘Cos you’re clever. And we need Pepper to look for Uncle Specs. They get on, she had first go with his sword thingy.”

Pepper was trying to work out whether to be proud or annoyed, but they were used to Adam making the plans. They were about to split up when a sudden cracking noise and an impact of large adult bodies a short distance away on the greensward froze them momentarily. Then, as one, they scrambled back behind the cover of the hedge.

* * *

Aziraphale and Crowley tumbled to the floor of the clearing, both slightly stunned by the impact. Aziraphale had actually landed on top of Crowley, a position which gave him ideas he simply couldn’t afford to entertain at the moment. Crowley began struggling underneath him, provoking even more notions that he didn’t have time to deal with. He thought he could feel Crowley’s wings about to manifest, sensed a preliminary crackle and pushed himself up, giving Crowley a shake by his lapels. “Stop! Think!”

Crowley stopped – at least his wings didn’t unfurl and he didn’t disappear – though it was unclear whether he was thinking, exactly. “If you just miracle yourself back she’ll be all over you,” Aziraphale pointed out.

“But I have to go to him,” Crowley insisted. “She might hurt him… Oh, Aziraphale, the first human in six thousand years I’ve _longed _for…” His hand came up to his face, and Aziraphale’s heart twisted itself into entirely new shapes as he said soothingly “We’ll get you to him. I promise. But we have to be safe. And we were looking for the children, remember? We have to find…” The hallooing they had heard in the woods replayed itself in his mind and for a moment thoughts churned at such near-lightspeed that even he couldn’t follow them, until suddenly and seamlessly they all snicked into place.

“Crowley – I just realized what play we’re in!” Crowley remained stunned. “You liked the comedies, remember? Come to your senses. I think I see what’s happened – “

There was a rustle in the hedge and an almost inaudible hiss of “_ssshhh!”_

Aziraphale got to his feet with all the dignity he could muster and said “Is that you, Adam?”

There was a louder rustle. Adam stepped out into the moonlight, not seeming to notice a large spider in his hair.

The angel, when put out, was capable of the gravity and asperity of a well-seasoned schoolmistress, and he was bringing that quality to bear with everything he had. “Where are your friends, Adam?”

“We’re here,” said Wensley, slinking out from behind the hedge.

“And here,” said Brian, sounding as if he were about to faint.

Pepper crept out into the moonlight. “I told them it was a reversion to the patriarchy,” she said unconvincingly.

“To do what, exactly?”

Wensley, who as the originator of the idea felt deeply responsible and had already had _his_ whole life pass before his eyes three times – after all, he was only eleven – looked at his feet as he twisted them in the grass. “Love charm Anathema because she was being so cross with Newt,” he said. “He ought to have a chance with her, he’s so clever. And Newt because he was getting cold feet. We tried to make it fair.”

“Well, now Anathema’s in love with the wrong demon, the wrong demon is ready to swim the Hellespont for Newt, and _you _four had better not read any more Shakespeare until I say you can. I don’t believe I’m telling you that.”

“Newt,” murmured Crowley in a tone of reverent pining. “Can we go now? I’m afraid for him…”

“Blimey,” said Brian.

“Exactly. Adam, I assume this is your doing. Can you undo it, very, very promptly? I _may_ bring up the rest of those _Avengers_ compilations if you do, instead of putting them in the free box on the doorstep.”

“He only did the sleeping part,” explained Wensley. “Pepper said it was more sporting that way.”

“I see, “ said Aziraphale, who didn’t. “And the actual distracted, delirious infatuation part…?”

“Um… that was me,” said Pepper. She reached into her anorak.

“This should put it right,” she explained, extending the bottle.

Aziraphale, who had seen the first reading of the play, regarded the label anyway: _Uncle Roy’s Woodsmoke Essence. _ “Mum never used it so I washed out the bottle six times before putting moonflower essence in it,” Pepper explained. Privately Aziraphale thought woodsmoke was just the right note for Crowley. He set his handkerchief on the grass, to avoid stains, and knelt by the demon, who was seated loosely with his eyes a million miles away.

“Do you think you can manage to drop off to sleep again, my dear?” he said gently. “We’re going to go look for Mr. Pulsifer now, and the time will pass more quickly for you if you sleep. You’ve always been so good at that. Can you try?”

“I miss him…”

“Yes, yes. Just lie back here, that’s right. Close your eyes. Just drift back to sleep, it’ll feel good.”

“_Give me to drink mandragora, that I might sleep out this great gap of time/ My Antony is away_,” quoted Crowley, surprisingly.

“He always said he didn’t like the tragedies,” said Aziraphale. “Hmph. Remarkable. I wonder if that’s where he got the name.” He nodded at Adam, who seemed to be concentrating. "All right, Adam, just a _little_ help, but I don't want you to get too comfortable with this kind of thing." Aziraphale was surprised a second time; he found himself humming the lullaby that Crowley had intoned over Warlock’s pillow only a few years before. He didn’t actually remember pausing outside the boy’s bedroom on the way to the rockery to hear Nanny Ashtoreth sing, but he must have done it often.

_Go to sleep and dream of pain  
Doom and darkness, blood and brains…_

“Eugh,” shuddered Brian.

“Not quite the thing, is it? Well, _When you wake/you shall have/All the pretty little Pulsifers…”_ Aziraphale had an agreeable counter-tenor. Crowley shifted on the grass, murmuring “P is for Prince... P is for Pulsifer… P is for Pretty… P is for Precious… snfphpfphllt.”

“I think that’s got it,” said Aziraphale. Gently, he lifted the dark glasses and stroked a drop from the bottle across each of Crowley’s eyelids.

“Now,” he said, “I believe our next order of business is Saving Private Pulsifer. Does anyone have any ideas?”

* * *

Private Pulsifer, as it happened, had succeeded in marshaling his senses once he remembered that he was a fully equipped, well-prepared witch-finder. The first thing was to get back to open ground. His duffel coat yielded an orienteering compass, and there was a packet of lucifers which in the absence of his torch – he had crawled in all directions over the forest floor to no avail – could be sparingly and responsibly used to consult it and keep him on the right track. It would have taken one of the children under ten minutes to get to the little clearing between the wood and the orchard rows to the west, but not being eleven – possibly never having been eleven – Newt took a good deal longer. Finally the conversation of high-pitched voices drew him in a direction close to the one he had already fixed on, and in a few moments he was stumbling (very uncomfortably) through a stand of buckthorn into the open.

“Pepper! Brian! Is that you? Why were you following us?”

“We – “ They both started to answer at the same time and then both shut up.

“We’ve had complications,” came Adam’s voice.

Wensley was tugging at Newt’s sleeve. “I’ve got your torch.” Newt grabbed it and thumbed it on, unfortunately in the exact direction where Crowley lay near the kneeling angel, rubbing across his eyes with one palm as he levered up on the other elbow. Newt uttered frantically on a gasping intake of air and didn’t bolt only because Pepper grabbed his cuff. “It’s all _right,_” she said as he backpedaled.

“ ‘Ziraphale?” came the groggy voice. “I had the _damned_est… “ The slit-pupilled, vaguely backlit sulfur-yellow eyes lifted and settled directly on the paralyzed Newt.

“Ohhhhhh, _shit._”

“Children present,” admonished Aziraphaale.

“It’s all right,” repeated Pepper. “We fixed it.”

“Not quite,” Aziraphale said.

* * *

Newt had not been happy with the idea. But then, he was not happy with any of it, once everyone had managed to explain.

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t like it any more than you do, mate,” said Crowley testily. He was not going to forgive Newt in a hurry for – well, for being _Newt _in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Going to need a full medicine chest, you are, if she’s anything like that with you when she’s in her right mind.”

Newt’s expression was apprehensive, if that is the right word for almost indecent anticipation.

“Would you just mind putting those glasses back on?” he said, he hoped sufficiently humbly.

_* * *_

Anathema had spent a little while sobbing out her heart against the trunk of a large Ribston Pippin. Her pendulum was still on her belt, but her hazel wand had snapped, and her hair was full of fragments of twig and grass and a slightly fermented smell from a deadfall apple. Her fingers closed over one of the Ribstons, which were verging on ripe, and she dug her teeth into it, somehow feeling that would connect her to her sweetheart. Any thoughts of Newt had left her mind.

Yes. That brought a sort of resonance to the night. He was in _that _direction – all she had to do was put one foot in front of the other.

She slipped in fallen apple flesh, squelched in rivulets, twisted her ankle on stones. Nothing mattered except that she was headed, straight as arrow-flight or the track she had been seeking, toward the presence of her true love.

She could hear him calling.

* * *

“_Six thousand_ years of tempting and I’ve come to this,” groused Crowley, _sotto voce._

"We have to find her somehow, and this is simpler and quicker," said Aziraphale. "I think the children have shown us _quite_ enough of what they can do tonight."

“I am going to _hex_ you. Frogs in your bookshop. Miracle London fresh out of Belgian pastries.”

“It’s for Anathema, dear.”

Crowley echoed him almost in a falsetto. “_Anathema, dear!!!!”_

“Try to make it sound more earnest.”  
  
“Anathema, can you forgive me? Come out, come to me.” In a lower tone of voice: “Do you really think this is going to work?”

“She seemed quite besotted with you. Almost as much as you were with – “

“_Stow it_.”

Crowley had situated himself in the open space at the southern end of the orchard rows. It was about the most visible spot in the immediate surroundings, and the moon was white as frost on the grass, sloping down towards the wood to the east and up to a gentle ridge to their south. Above them, up the long slope to the west, were barely visible glints of moonbeams from the windows of the Bentley. Newt and the Them were clustered in the shadows of the hedge, trying to be as invisible as possible; Aziraphale had taken refuge under one stray Cox near Crowley’s position and was encouraging him in earnest stage whispers.

“Here we are, I do think,” he said.

A small human form had emerged from the edge of Hogback Wood just where it began to rise and straggle up the ridge to the south. Even from this distance a distinct limp was visible. “Oh dear,” breathed Aziraphale. “You’ve not had her try to eat your face off in bloody pentameter,” retorted Crowley. Louder, he continued: “My love? Will you return to me? I don’t know what came over me – “

“It seems to be working,” observed Aziraphale as Anathema, now clearly revealed in the moonlight, came pelting down the slope, jog-trotting on what was probably a twisted ankle but covering ground at a remarkable rate of speed. Crowley braced for impact. He was barely able to remain standing, given the simple physics of velocity and mass, and only a little more able to prevent himself from being devoured upright.

“You – are –– mine – now and forever –” breathed Anathema, locking her fingers in his clothes and plastering kisses on his face. Crowley managed to get one arm free and raised it overhead, waving it like a drowning man. Aziraphale, who was stronger than he looked, covered the distance between them in three quick paces and seized Anathema’s shoulders. She rounded on him with a hiss that would have done Crowley credit and shoved him backwards.

“Tartar, that one,” opined Crowley.

“My love?” husked Anathema.

“Bull’s eye,” said Aziraphale, as he scored a direct hit in her face with about half the contents of the woodsmoke flavoring bottle.

Dripping and scandalized, Anathema stood on the cusp of delusion and sanity as the moonflower essence trickled from her brows into her eyes. She smacked the rivulets away with the heels of her palms. She shook her head. She huffed a half dozen breaths in and out, knuckling her eyesockets.

Because he was a stickler for literary form, but also for precision of language, Aziraphale said “There stands your love.”

Crowley dropped his shades and waggled his tongue for effect.

“Ssss,” he said..

“Aack,” said Anathema.

“I’m glad that worked,” said Aziraphale. “I don’t think we could have talked her into napping, do you?”

“What – did – you – where’s – “

Anathema staggered a few steps back, coming down on the injured foot and buckling before she caught herself on Aziraphale’s arm. “_Anathema!!!”_ came a child-shrill, panicked shout, and Pepper burst out of the hedge, hurtling towards them in a perfect turmoil of distress and guilt. She had made this mess. It was her fault. It was –

…a carpet, a ribbon, a galaxy under her feet, a blaze of silver and diamonds in the grass, casting a glamour upward to bathe her in an otherworldly light that had something of moonbeams in it, and something of firelight, and something of the deep reflections that make cut crystal seem infinite inside. Her feet were rooted where she stood. Arrow-straight the road of light ran, from out of sight across the Tadfield road, down to the edge of the wood and deep into it, unbroken.

“Anathema?” she whispered, tears welling at the beauty of it. There was a sound inside her head, it couldn’t be outside, it hummed in her bones.

The luminescence swirled upward at the edge of the wood. A flicker detached itself, swooping in to circle above Pepper’s head.

“The Straight Track,” quavered Anathema, supporting herself between demon and angel.

If the music was inside Pepper, it was all around them. Indefinite forms moved in the vortex at the edge of the trees, a teasing window into somewhere that was _assuredly _not the Hogback Wood, someplace filled with singing and the gay, stately rhythms of an intricate dance. Aziraphale felt an unbidden impulse to commence the gavotte, and recalled the taste of the fruits in Eden. Crowley remembered that he had once hung stars in the firmament. Every longing they had ever felt washed over them in a tide of memory and grief, and they turned to gaze at each other over Anathema’s head.

“Angel, that’s not one of ours,” said Crowley.

“Well, it’s certainly not one of _ours_.”

“Can we – “

But Aziraphale had already tried to take a step toward the track. The effort merely knocked him to his knees (at this point, he admitted defeat in the matter of the trousers). Pepper was uttering a high cry that could have been fear, pain or ecstasy.

“Bloody hell, _I _can’t get near it.,” Crowley said. “It’s like sssliding offf glass.” The music was more distinct now, individual lights glittering in the place that was Not The Wood, and the smells of a feast such as no one could imagine drifted to them over the night air. The singing grew more distinct; dancing shapes beckoned.

_Come to us, mortal child. You will never have to grow up, you will sing and feast, magic will surround you forever._ They saw Pepper take a step along the track, almost as if something was pulling at her; rock back on her feet.

“I can’t – it’s so beautiful – _Anathema!!_” Pepper was swaying in time to the music, flutes and little cymbals sounding in it now, and the silvery will o’ the wisp grew stronger, pirouetting above her head. She took another step and another, gracefully, as if already entering the dance; the angel and the demon were both frozen to the spot, as if bound to the turf by something that scorned both Heaven and Hell; feeling Anathema’s hand on either shoulder, clenching, bracing –

– as she propelled herself upward and closed the distance between her and Pepper, kneeling to throw both arms around the girl, clutching tight, swaying as Pepper half-struggled to move further.

A scuffle in the hedge. Newt Pulsifer, devoid of duffel coat, was somehow there in two strides, paused for a wide-eyed breath and sprang forward onto the track.

His arms locked around Pepper from the other side. The sound of the cymbals grew louder and Pepper cried out again, struggling. The dancing light over her head, stronger every second, seemed to follow the rhythm of her keening. Anathema turned her face up to it.

“I see you clearly, what you are,” she called in a ringing voice. “_You shall not have this child._ No fairy gold nor fairy food, nor fairy song will lure her from us. _Mend the way – “ _she was visibly at the limits of her bodily strength – “_pass from here, shut the door.”_

For a moment the door at the end of the track began to fade and waver as Anathema reached above her head, hand weaving and gesturing. Then it grew more solid again, the singing louder. “Newt – I need to finish the charm – _hang on, I can’t hold her!!!”_

But instead Newt, leaving only one arm cinched around Pepper, reached up to grasp Anathema’s hand and twine their fingers together

An opalescent haze formed around their linked hands, wove itself downward in a cocoon that enveloped all three. The track shimmered under them. A cloud began to drift across the moon, high ice crystals breaking into a muted rainbow halo that faded as the light was obscured.

The dancing flame over Pepper’s head swirled, dipped, and swooped through the closing door into Faerie. The straight track faded. Newt and Anathema loosed their grip on Pepper but kept her snug between them, hands clasping at each other, sobbing for breath.

There was a rustle beside Aziraphale as Crowley began to climb to his feet. The Them were dashing raggedly over the grass.

“Well, _that’s _something you don’t see every day,” said Crowley.

“Nothing -- of Above -- or Below in it,” panted Aziraphale. Alas. The morning coat seemed to also be a casualty.

“When was someone going to tell _us_?”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio – “ began Aziraphale sententiously.

“_Aaaaahhh,_ I _haaate_ it when you quote that one, do you know what it took out of me?”

The Them had surrounded Pepper, who had stood wordlessly gazing at Newt and Anathema for a moment, dashing tears from her face with the back of her hand, before turning to her friends. Brian and Wensley were talking over each other.

“–we saw it, it was so beautiful –”

“– but scary – “

“ – you were all silver –”

Adam only gazed silently at Pepper, soberly, a gaze that had in it neither awe nor puppy love but the respect of an equal.

“We’re alike,” he said finally. “Only different.”

“I know,” said Pepper quietly.

“And I think… I think we ought to go back to being kids now, and playing with Dog, and fighting with wooden swords.”

Pepper swallowed. “Can I be Zorro next time?”

“Toss you for it.”

Anathema had her hands on Newt’s shoulders, at first it seemed for support, but it looked as if the injury to her foot had somehow miraculously resolved. “It hurt a moment ago, but I guess it wasn’t serious,” she said.

Crowley threw the angel a significant glance, but Aziraphale only smiled secretly to himself, without meeting his gaze.

“Owww, all right, good one,” said Crowley. “I’ll take care of all the parents sleeping in, then. They can blame it on all that Piriwhatsit for their allergies."

“You saved her, not me,” Anathema was saying, noticeably not removing her hands from Newt’s shoulders. “I couldn’t…”

“We did it together,” said Newt, “the way – “ he bit his tongue before going on to say _the way I want to do everything for the rest of my life,_ and simply rested a hand on her forearm. She certainly wasn’t shaking it off.

“You left your witch-findy backpack up in the high orchard,” she said. “I think I could remember where…”

This time Newt went for broke. “Could we look for it in the morning?” he said. “When the light’s better?”

For answer Anathema leaned in and kissed him. At first it was tentative, but then they melded together, pausing for a moment to shove the pendulum over to the side of Anathema’s belt.

“Well now isn’t that sweet,” said Crowley.

“Am I going to need a full medicine chest?” said Newt when they broke the kiss, rather hopefully. “Mr. Crowley said…”

“It’s all right, I made plenty of comfrey salve last week,” said Anathema and kissed him again, even longer this time.

“Oh, now they just need to get a room,” Crowley growled.

“You know, Crowley…” began Aziraphale, then paused. “Your habit of sleeping so _fluently _is not without its liabilities.”

“I don’t know, angel, it was kind of entertaining. And everyone seems to have come out of it all right.”

“At least we didn’t have any rude mechanicals. Or an ass’s head.”

“It would have been less embarrassing than _Newton Pulsifer,_” shuddered Crowley.

“Anathema seems happy.”

The Them seemed to have come to some sort of decision. They stepped forward in a row and Pepper assumed a posture of Important Gravity.

_“If we shadows have offended,”_

she declaimed, having read the play after borrowing it from Wensley,

_“Think but this, and all is ended –_  
_That you have but slumbered here_  
_ While these visions did appear._

"Wensley – what's the next bit?” she hissed under her breath.

Wensley, who had actually read the part in the panto, continued:

_“And, as I am an honest Puck,_  
_If we have unearned luck_  
_ So to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,_  
_ We shall make amends ere long.”_

He gave Crowley a sidelong glance as he said it. The Them all bowed gravely.

“Bit thin for an apology, isn’t it?” said Crowley under his breath.

“I suppose, Crowley, but it’s good for the young to have an interest in literature.” In a louder, schoolmaster’s voice, he said, “I will think of a suitable penance presently. It’s a speciality of my old firm, for one thing. But right now, you need to go home to bed. Who wants a lift?”

"That's _my_ car you're offering to fill up with kids," muttered Crowley.

“Um – I think Anathema and I will walk,” said Newt. “It’s a beautiful night.”

“We’ve all got our bicycles,” said Adam and Pepper, more or less at the same time

“I’d better look all of you over first,” said Anathema. “I don’t want anything from tonight – _sticking_.”

“That part about escaping the serpent’s tongue - a little harsh, don’t you think?” said Crowley as Anathema did something arcane and diagnostic around Pepper’s head with the pendulum.

“It depends on what you think of serpents, doesn’t it?”

“S’pose it does.” Crowley glanced over at the angel. “Home?”

“I think rather a lot of one I know,” Aziraphale said instead of answering, not meeting Crowley’s blank, reflective gaze.

“What’s his name? I’ll tell him if I meet him.”

Aziraphale did turn toward him then. “Crowley….” He breathed in deeply once, and out. ”What about us?”  
  
Crowley’s brows lifted. “What about us?"

Silence for several seconds. “Crowley…When you were… _besotted_ with Newt – “

“Gggck,” gagged Crowley softly.

“ – and Anathema was throwing herself on you, it felt… well, like I’d never be able to enjoy a crepe or a good Sauternes again. I…”

“Bloody hell, angel, that’s serious.”

“Do you take my meaning?”

“I think I do.”

Crowley gazed at him steadily, for so long that Aziraphale began to fear the silent subtext was _I wish I didn’t_.

“Have I made a mess of things?”

Crowley shook his head slowly and then, even more slowly, raised a hand gently to the plump cheek. “No, Angel.” And he bent to brush the other cheek with the most respectful and delicate of kisses.

“How long?” he said softly, barely lifting his head.

“Ah – “ It took Aziraphale a few tries to get words out. “Since the Blitz, I think.”

“Bit slow on the uptake then, aren’t you? I’d known – ”

“Well – I did worry that I was… a bit too slow for _you_.” Aziraphale leaned in a little to rest his forehead against Crowley’s jacketed shoulder.

”Got there eventually though, didn’t you?”

“I’ve been – sort of running away from it. Because there was nothing in the way now. And I was so afraid I’d – what’s the expression? bollocks it up?”

“You couldn’t, you’re an angel.”

“A rather exhausted angel, I’m afraid.”

Crowley reached down to pick up Aziraphale’s soft, manicured hand and bring it to his own cheek. “You really should let me show you about sleeping. Lot to be said for it… y’know, I could jussst – demonstrate. You’d get the hang of it.”

“I think – I’d like to try that,” said Aziraphale. “…How big is your bed?”

“Big as you like, angel.” Now the tone was distinctly, let us say, playful. You might even, in all fairness, say _sly. _But then, Crowley was working with six millennia worth of experience in applied slyness_._

Aziraphale looked up with a cherubically innocent expression. “I suppose I could – make the effort.”

Crowley kissed him again then, a little less chastely, with a serpentine flicker of tongue.

“_Pas devant les enfants_, darling.”

For Anathema seemed to have satisfied herself that no scraps or shreds of contraband magic were hanging around the Them, and the little group was beginning to move off. “Good night, Uncle Specs,” called Brian. “Good night,” followed a ragged chorus from everyone.

“Come on,” said Crowley. “Just think, a nice nighttime drive without all that mental traffic on the M-way.”

“Well, who’s to blame for that?” chided Aziraphale.

Crowley started toward the Bentley, then reached back toward the angel, who was stepping as daintily as possible in the hope of not completely ruining his shoes.

“Give me your hand, if we be friends?”

Aziraphale caught up to him, smiling beatifically, the smile that had been making Crowley go silly in the head and rubbery in the knees since he had first seen it on the walls of Eden, and twined their fingers together.

They walked, in not too great a hurry, toward the waiting car.

* * *

“Uncle Specs and Uncle Shades were _kissing_ back there,” whispered Brian as they disengaged their bikes from the hedge, “and now look, they’re holding hands.”

“So?” said Pepper.

“Well, they’re both boys.”

“Strictly speaking, they’re _beings,_” said Wensleydale. “Anyway there’s loads of that in London. You see about it on the telly.”

“Gender is a construct of the patriarchy,” said Pepper.

“I’m going to be for it if Mum’s woke up,” said Adam.

They wheeled their bikes up to the road to meet Newt and Anathema.

* * *

The wedding was joyous. A local member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids performed the ceremony. Anathema jumped over a broom, Sergeant Shadwell and Madame Tracy came up all the way from their new place in Weymouth, and the Them served as attendants to the bride and groom, sporting little circlets of flowers. (Brian’s kept falling over his eye, and Pepper insisted on wearing a costume sword through the whole affair.) Mrs. Young provided several of her best pear tarts, there was Morris dancing, and some person or persons for whom money was apparently no object made the bride and groom a gift of a honeymoon week in a little romantic cottage in the Cotswolds.

The couple had been specific that it was meant to be a pagan ceremony from start to finish. But if either noticed Aziraphale throwing a little blessing their way, no one complained.

Crowley caught the bouquet.

_finis_

**Author's Note:**

> References to wendwood and the Old Straight Track, as well as the general arc of Pepper's predicament, are shamelessly mooched from Alan Garner's classic and disturbing _Moon of Gomrath_ (q.v.). 
> 
> The _ignis fatuus_, a form of bioluminescence probably involving phosphorescent gases, is a staple of mythology worldwide and in the British Isles is often conflated with Puck or Robin Goodfellow, or fairies generally. It's usually seen over marshy ground and in legend is described as a flicker of firelight distracting foot travellers from their path. The Hogback Wood is not marshy, but then this fic does not require a natural explanation.
> 
> Readers of my fic in other fandoms will have noticed that the author is fond of apple orchards.
> 
> Come say hello on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


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